This error may appear unrelated to VMware, but
it seems that VMware can suck up all memory and starve EXT3 of enough memory
to write the journal and memory can't be swapped to disk because that
would cause more disk IO... Or something like that -- that doesn't seem quite
right because SWAP partitions are different partitions and are not journaled.

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf and add this line

vm.min_free_kbytes = 10240

Alternatively you can add this to /etc/rc.local or somewhere else in the boot process.